Offbeat Humor

History

Ancient Egyptian pigment-mixing palette, perhaps intended for cosmetics, ca. 3000 BC. The palette is moulded to represent a Nile Tilapia, embellished with other Nilotic animals. #Egypt

Image: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Egyptian-Oriental Collection (9067) pic.twitter.com/xErGypF0IO

— Dr Rob Cromarty (@DocCrom) July 27, 2020

Not only are you wrong, but ordinary people can see you are wrong.

 From Laypeople Can Predict Which Social-Science Studies Will Be Replicated Successfully by Suzanne Hoogeveen, et al.  From the Abstract:

Large-scale collaborative projects recently demonstrated that several key findings from the social-science literature could not be replicated successfully. Here, we assess the extent to which a finding’s replication success relates to its intuitive plausibility. Each of 27 high-profile social-science findings was evaluated by 233 people without a Ph.D. in psychology. Results showed that these laypeople predicted replication success with above-chance accuracy (i.e., 59%). In addition, when participants were informed about the strength of evidence from the original studies, this boosted their prediction performance to 67%. We discuss the prediction patterns and apply signal detection theory to disentangle detection ability from response bias. Our study suggests that laypeople’s predictions contain useful information for assessing the probability that a given finding will be replicated successfully.

 Highly pertinent given the high replication failure rates to date, particularly in sociology and psychology. 

The take-away is that if you are a reasonably bright person, if you see social-science findings which seem counter-intuitive and unreasonable, you have good reason to go with your good sense over the academic rigamarole.  You are pretty likely to be right.

No wonder academia is falling into such untrustworthy disrepute.  Not only are they publishing overwhelmingly false research findings (at least in the humanities) but the findings are so manifestly obvious that ordinary citizens can reasonably accurately estimate that they are wrong.

Not a branding I would want to hang my hat on.

Between the Sheets by Phil Lockwood

Between the Sheets by Phil Lockwood

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

Overdoses up 40% in Nashville. That equates to 55 excess overdose deaths during the lockdown, mostly of younger people with many years of life left ahead of them.

Number of COVID-19 deaths in Nashville under age 45: 3. https://t.co/NM75BLH6XY

— Matt Malkus (@malkusm) July 23, 2020

I see wonderful things

What does a baby rhino sound like? Certainly not anything like we thought they would. If we had to describe their sound, it would probably be a cross between dolphins and when you pinch the neck of a balloon to let the air out [source and full video: https://t.co/TLG5z8DxqX] pic.twitter.com/qTqHakqvnj

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 18, 2020

An Insight

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

— G. K. Chesterton (@GKCdaily) July 28, 2020

Women judges, when working with male judges, impose harsher sentences?

 Well, it is an interesting study but I am unclear what exactly they are finding.  It is behind a firewall so I cannot clarify.  From Judge Peer Effects in the Courthouse by Ozak Eren and Naci H. Mocan.  From the Abstract:

Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual’s peers have an impact on that individual’s own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person’s decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether consequential decisions made by judges are impacted by the gender composition of these judges’ peer group. We utilize the universe of decisions on juvenile defendants in each courthouse in Louisiana between 1998 and 2012. Leveraging random assignment of cases to judges, and variations in judge peer composition generated by elections, retirements, deaths and resignations, we show that an increase in the proportion of female peers in the courthouse causes a rise in individual judges’ propensity to incarcerate, and an increase in the assigned sentence length. This effect is fully driven by female judges. Further analysis suggests that this behavior is unlikely to be a reflection of an effort to conform to evolving norms of judicial stringency, measured by peers’ harshness in sentencing, but that it is due to the sheer exposure to female colleagues.

The methodology looks reasonable.  Would have been good to know whether we are dealing with a large volume of cases or small.  Also would have been good to know whether there any trend lines over the fourteen years.  And as always - Show the damn effect size!  If the increase in assigned sentence increases from 12 months to 18 months, I am interested.  If it increases from 12 months to 12.5 months, then we almost certainly have an artifact of the analytical design.  Particularly if we are dealing with too few cases.

Lack of a reported effect size and absence of a sample size should have disqualified this from publication.  There is too much cognitive pollution as it is.

Accepting on, possibly misplaced, good faith that there is a real finding and that it has a material effect size, we still have one further mystery, which might be explained by the actual paper which is restricted.

What does it mean when they say "This effect is fully driven by female judges."  Does it mean that women judges when on a mixed panel, are more likely to assign harsher and longer sentences than they otherwise would do?  That seems the obvious reading.  But it is possible that they are accepting some unstated standard that all panels are usually male and that merely by adding female judges, the panel sentence becomes more harsh.  

Kind of a critical point.

Marking this as potentially very interesting but near cognitive pollution owing to deficient results reporting and ambiguity in writing.  

History

Always amazes me size of #Mauretania - see #Turbinia in same pic? #SwanHunter & #WighamRichardson joined forces; the biggest and fastest ship in 1906, holdign on to #BlueRiband for 22 years. Helped out at #Gallipolli too as troop carrier/hospital ship. #museumsfromhome pic.twitter.com/zXtlHTHjfm

— Discovery Museum (@Discovery_Mus) July 30, 2020

We are no longer in the realm of a marketplace of ideas and instead are in the blighted heath of blind coercion.

 From Public Affairs by C.P. Snow.  

Snow is the originator of the Two Cultures thesis.  In early 1959 he did a couple of radio programs which then led to his publication The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution later that year.  From Wikipedia:

Its thesis was that science and the humanities which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" had become split into "two cultures" and that this division was a major handicap to both in solving the world's problems.

Hardly an exceptionally contentious issue but one which did lead to a lot of debate as to whether there were two cultures, just how distinct they might be and whether indeed there was a divergence between them which had negative consequences.  

The debate continues in many quarters under different guises - EQ versus IQ, emotional thinking versus logical thinking, feeling versus thinking, holistic thinking versus deterministic thinking, etc.  Lots of variations, often riding on small definitional distinctions.

Over time Snow modified his original opinions somewhat and became more precise in his language, but basically remained on the position he had originally carved out.  

But the debates could be heated and prolonged.  Snow was a gifted writer and debater and was open to anyone.  But over time, he began to winnow out individuals who could not be relied upon to argue in good faith.  

With BLM, Antifa, Critical Theory, Postmodernism theory, etc. we are in much the same position.  We accept as a critical position that everyone has a place in the marketplace of ideas, even the most profoundly stupid and or evil ideas such as BLM, Antifa, Critical Theory, Postmodernism theory.  However, when electing whether to debate, we are hostage to whether there is even sufficient common ground to warrant such a debate.  If, as is the case with BLM, Antifa, Critical Theory, Postmodernism theory, there underlying philosophical position is tautologically incapable of such a debate in the marketplace of ideas, then there is no warrant to debate.

It goes against the mindset of the Classical Liberal mind and the values of the Classical Liberal heart, but it is inescapably true.  If your debating opponent demands your acceptance of their predicates, the very predicates that demand debate, then there are no grounds for discussion.

That is the argument Snow reluctantly faced with a bad-faith debater, Leavis.  Leavis was an intellectual who became a crank and eventually only argued based on his beliefs and opinions rather than on logic or evidence.  As always happens, he increasingly ended up defaulting to misdirection, fraud, deliberate misstatements and ad hominem arguments.  

THE CASE OF LEAVIS AND THE SERIOUS CASE 

In his lecture published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 April 1970 ['Literarism versus Scientism: the Misconception and the Menace'], Leavis refers to 'the debate about [or between] the Two Cultures', and then says — 'There has been no debate.'  The most recent bibliography of this topic that I have seen, compiled in an American university, lists between 1964 and 1968, in the English language alone, eighty-eight separate items.  It would have been more accurate for Leavis to say that there has been no debate between him and me.  There has not: nor will there be.  For one simple and overriding reason.  I can't trust him to keep to the ground-rules of academic or intellectual controversy.  By 'ground-rules' here, I do not mean anything in the least complex or difficult.  If I enter into discussion on any topic, intellectual, moral, practical, or whatever combination you like, it matters very little what I feel for my opponent, or what he feels for me.  But I am entitled to require — or if I am not so entitled then I have to beg to be excused — that he will observe some basic and very simple rules.  If he refers to words that I have said or written, he will quote them accurately.  He will not attribute to me attitudes and opinions which I do not hold, and if he makes any such attributions, he will check them against the documentary evidence.  He will be careful when referring to incidents in my biography, and he will be scrupulous about getting his facts right.  Naturally, I have a duty to obey the same rules in return.  Nothing could be much more prosaic or straightforward; but without these ground-rules any sort of serious human exchange becomes impossible. Leavis has, however, not observed them in his references to me and others.  That is why I will not enter into discussion with him. 

It clearly pains Snow to turn his back on the appearance of a debate but he makes clear the wisdom of doing so when there are no shared bases of trust or rules of debate.

It is marginally reassuring to see such a world-class thinker debating with the same issue we deal with today.

Are there core issues which are valid among at least some BLM, Antifa, Critical Theory, Postmodernism advocates?  Almost certainly.  But we cannot access those issues or the arguments supporting them when the advocates eschew any commitment to evidence, logic, empiricism or good faith argumentation.  As long as their only objective is subjugation and winning at any cost, we are no longer in the realm of a marketplace of ideas and instead are in the blighted heath of blind coercion.

And that is no place for a civilized person to waste their time.